A Merchants’ Primer to Get Through Ethnic Minefields : Houston activist’s manual is designed to help shopkeepers eliminate misunderstandings when differing cultures collide.
A black youth roams the aisles of convenience store, raising the suspicions of the Asian clerk. A confrontation ends in death when the night clerk draws a weapon, killing the young man.
When this tragedy occurred in Houston last summer, angry black leaders picketed the store for weeks until its Vietnamese owner gave up and sold the business. Many here considered the incident over. But Glenda Joe, a 40-year-old Chinese-American, couldn’t shake a feeling of foreboding.
“The rumblings of serious racial problems were being heard in my hometown,” she said. “I wanted to do something about it before it got worse.”
Joe’s solution was to write a 13-page manual that she describes as a “primer on the American way of doing business.” To Joe, a public relations consultant and community activist who grew up working at her father’s convenience store, the challenge was clear: eliminate the distrust that builds when people of different cultures misunderstand each other.
“When you’re an immigrant, no one sits you down and says, ‘Look, here’s how we do things here,’ ” she said. “Unless you show them how, how are they supposed to know?”
With a home computer and copy machine, Joe produced a straightforward compendium of the do’s and don’ts of customer relations. Get to know your customers. Be courteous, friendly and appreciative. “In a free-enterprise capitalist society, the customer is always right (even when they are wrong!),” writes Joe.
She also addresses perceptions of Asian merchants as clannish, overly suspicious people who keep to themselves. Joe advises shopkeepers to get involved in the community by hiring from the neighborhood and donating to local causes.
“It is the American way,” she writes. “If it were not for your customers . . . you would have no revenues at all. . . . It is the community that makes your profit possible in the first place.”
Reminding merchants of the Los Angeles riots, Joe notes that many Asian businesses were destroyed. She adds: “It is imperative for Houston’s Asian merchants to . . . correct any business practices which contribute to the level of tension. . . . To ignore this problem is a losing business policy.”
One of the most important business practices to adopt, notes Joe, is to leave shoplifters to the police and to install security devices instead of relying on guns.
Although the guidelines were written in English, Joe is seeking donations for production of Korean, Cambodian and Chinese versions. A Vietnamese edition of the guidelines is available now, but won’t be widely distributed until the city provides a list of Asian-owned businesses next March.
In the meantime, articles about the manual have prompted more than 500 inquiries from New York to San Francisco. Joe worries that others will look to the manual as a panacea for racial problems it can’t begin to address.
“This is timely for Houston, because it’s preventative, a way to address a problem before it gets out of control,” she said. “I don’t know how helpful this will be in places where the problem is a lot worse, where people have been burned out, threatened and both sides are pretty hardened.”
One believer is Kathleen Hom, a special assistant to Washington, D.C., Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly. The non-judgmental tone of the guidelines makes it accessible, said Hom; prior attempts to relay similar information were “conveyed in a manner that was not heard.”
Hom particularly likes Joe’s attention to cultural differences that can be easily misunderstood. For instance, one woman was incensed when an Asian clerk “threw” her change on the counter instead of handing it to her. Hom explained that in Asia, it is considered rude to touch a stranger’s hand. “Each time you hear or see something, you interpret it through who you are and where you came from,” said Hom.
In New York, systems manager Jerry Chin spread word of the manual to the mayor’s office of community affairs, which may distribute a Korean version to area merchants. “Glenda Joe hit home,” said Chin of her practical, bottom-line approach. “It’s a matter of self-interest. If you want to do business in America, you have to understand your market.”
As part owner of the Southern Grocery in northeast Houston, Phuong Thi appreciates the value of good customer relations, taking care to greet each new face with a smile and a friendly hello. Thi said that the manual reinforced the idea that “to make business in America, you should treat everyone equal, or like a special guest. . . . I think most of us know that already, but is good to be reminded.”
Thi paused, then pointed to three new tea sets, each with one cup missing. “Some people want everything, so they take it,” she said. For Glenda Joe’s approach to work, she observed, merchants cannot act alone. “Customers must try, too,” she said.
